From Chaos to Order

From Chaos to Order, first published in 2016, is a book of nine first-person chapters carrying a single argument: order is maintained, or it is lost. It opens on what chaos costs, in the analogy the book keeps returning to — a life without order stalls the way traffic does when the rules are waived, and a stalled life drags on the lives around it. Order is not the natural state of things, and control of your own life is the one control held over everything else.

The middle names five enablers and gives each its own chapter: work, which is present in all the others; foresight, which keeps work pointed somewhere; proactivity, which deals with a problem before it materialises; listening to reality, especially when it says unwelcome things; and questioning your life, the habit Innocent Mwatsikesimbe credits with his own best decisions. Two closing chapters add the temperament the method needs — a patience he likens to death's own, spent unwaveringly on keeping order — and its reward, a view from above where the details and the bigger picture are visible at once.